Mr. Sinclair's eyes brightened. "What good are your fine friends to you? You would never ask them to help you, I know; but if you could bring yourself to that, would you not feel a bitter difference? It is not mean to shrink from asking favors, when they are for ourselves. Walter Savage Landor was neither mean nor a fool; yet he makes one of his best characters say that the highest price we can pay for a favor is to ask for it, and everybody who has tried knows that. You would sink at once from a friend to a dependent. Now your friends ask no questions, and you tell them no lies. If they give the subject a thought, they fancy you in some quiet, retired, and highly genteel apartment, if rather near the eaves, then so for a pure northern light, leisurely and elegantly painting photographs, for which you receive the highest prices, and thanks to boot. They don't see an upstartly assistant criticising your work, or a stingy employer taking off part of the price for some imaginary flaw. And if they did, they would only tell you that such annoyances are trivial, that you must rise above them. I've heard that kind of talk. But those who go down to battle with the pigmies know how tormenting their bites are. The worst of it is, too, that you cannot long maintain the dignity and purity of your own character in this petty strife, It isn't in the nature of things, I don't care what may be said to the contrary by parlor ascetics and philosophers. They have no right to dogmatize on the necessary influence of circumstances in which they have never been placed. Moreover, constant labor is lowering to the mind, and any work is degrading to the person who can do a higher kind of work. It may be saving to him whose leisure would be employed in frivolity and license; but that person is already base. The time you spend in studying how to make one dollar do the work of five makes a lower being of you. I can see this in you, Margaret. Your manners and conversation are not what they were. You have no time to read, or think, or look at pictures, or hear lectures, or listen to music--none. You have only time for work, and, the work finished, are too weary for anything but sleep; perhaps too weary for that even, How long do you expect to keep up with such a life dragging at you?" Miss Hamilton lifted between her finger and thumb a fold of the dress she wore. "All the time I could spare from my painting in the last three weeks has been devoted to the task of making this dress out of an old one," she said. "It was a difficult problem; but I solved it. I was always fond of the mathematics. Of course, during those three weeks my universe revolved around a black bombazine centre. O sir! I know better than you can tell me, how degrading such labor is. God in the beginning imposed it as a curse; and a curse it is!"